Video subtitling for the GNOME desktop

I'm very happy to announce release 0.9 of Gnome Subtitles. This includes major features, as well as many bug fixes and contributions.

Additional features:

• Allow to close a file without quitting the application (File Close)
• Replace All now replaces translations too, besides the normal subtitle text
• Don't change the timing mode, after saving a file, to reflect the timing mode of the subtitle format chosen for saving
• Added Insert and Delete Subtitles toolbar buttons, removed Find and Replace from the toolbar
• Improved handling of text formatting tags in SubRip files
• Show Matroska Video files (MKV) when listing video files
• Fixed crash on opening a translation file with no subtitles loaded
• Major refactoring of the video playback engine, with GStreamer Playbin (code from the FuseMC project) being incorporated into the project source tree and GStreamer events being received asynchronously now, which means the user interface adapts to the video in an asynchronous/non-blocking way
• Fixed some bugs in the video playback engine, such as loading a file when the previously loaded file wasn't played, and video position not being correctly updated after loading the video and before starting playback

Changes in the project dependencies:

• Requires gtk, gtk-sharp, glade-sharp and gconf-sharp 2.12 or higher
• No longer requires gnome-sharp nor sublib

Translations:

• Djihed Afifi (ar)
• Joan Duran (ca)
• Kamil Paral, Lucas Lommer, Petr Kovar, Rinu (cs)
• Joe Hansen, Kristian Kjærgaard (da)
• Felix Braun, Mario Blättermann (de)
• Gabriel Ruiz, Jorge González (es)
• Ilkka Tuohela (fi)
• Luca Ferretti, Simone Oberti (it)
• Kjartan Maraas (nb)
• Yannig Marchegay (oc)
• Piotr Drąg (pl)
• António Lima (pt)
• César Veiga, Fábio Nogueira, Henrique P Machado, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle (pt_BR)
• Nickolay V. Shmyrev (ru)
• Daniel Nylander (sv)

Bug fixes:

• The file with a movie is not always automatically selected (#417975)
• Improvements to selection types in timings dialogs (#430737)
• Add support for viewing and correcting line length (#430961)
• Synchronize subtitles using multiple sync points (#471393)
• Allow to seek to a specified time instant (#504560)
• Configure script doesn't check for gstreamer-plugins-base headers (#520171)
• Make frequently-used menu items accessible in the toolbar (#530833)
• German Translation (#534748)
• Parallel build fails (#534889)
• Crash when trying to open a file (#540009)
• Suboptimal parsing of SRT-file (#552221)
• Strings like 'gtk-cancel' and so should not be translatable (#576197)
• Build error (#577127)

Contributors:

• Arx Cruz, Lucas Lommer

Additional thanks:

• Adam Dixon, Julian Sikorski, Luciano A. Ferrer, Marcin Zajaczkowski, Satoshi Tanabe

SubLib, the subtitle library used by Gnome Subtitles, has been merged into the Gnome Subtitles source code repository.

The original purpose of the SubLib subtitle library was to provide multimedia applications with a common and simple way to work with different file formats, performing file editing, searching, translation and synchronization. Since its creation, although some projects have used SubLib in order to take some concepts and ideas, as was the case with a couple of commercial applications, SubLib itself wasn't used by those projects. In fact, SubLib is currently only used by the Gnome Subtitles project.

That said, it was decided to merge its source code into Gnome Subtitles. This move not only eases the development of Gnome Subtitles, but also facilitates the tasks of packaging and releasing the application.

Gnome Subtitles has been featured, once again, in the Press.

Issue #3 (August/September 2008) of the Linux Pratique Essentiel magazine features an article covering funcionality from Gnome Subtitles 0.8. A thumbnail version is available (Gnome Subtitles is in page 9).

Thanks to the great work of Julian Sikorski and Alexander Kahl, Gnome Subtitles is now available in the official Fedora 9 repositories.

Gnome Subtitles 0.8 has been released. Release details follow.

• Added spell checking support:
  • Highlights spelling errors while typing
  • Uses Enchant in order to support multiple spell checking backends
  • Allows to spell check subtitles and translation in different languages
• Added support for the following subtitle formats:
  • AQ Title
  • MacSUB
  • Sofni
  • SubCreator 1.x
  • ViPlay Subtitle File
• Allow to show the translation with the video, besides the original subtitles
• Fixed a crash that happened when closing the Encoding Selection dialog
• Improved the auto-detection of subtitle formats
• Do not package SubLib anymore, it should be installed as a package of its own

Bug fixes:

• Spellchecker support (#462317)
• Selecting translation to show on top of movie (#495551)
• Some strings are hard to translate (#510808)
• Crash on close of "Add or remove" encoding dialog (#520804)
• Files are installed with wrong permissions (#524765)

Translations:

• Joan Duran (ca)
• Philip Withnall (en_GB)
• Jorge Gonzlez (es)
• Ilkka Tuohela (fi)
• Alexandre Imache, Claude Paroz, Frederic Peters, Stphane Raimbault (fr)
• Yair Hershkovitz (he)
• Yannig Marchegay (oc)
• Antnio Lima (pt)
• Daniel Nylander (sv)

Thanks:

• Julian Sikorski, Mathias Brodala, Marcin Zajaczkowski, Nazar Kulyk

Gnome Subtitles is now in the official Ubuntu repositories (Ubuntu 8.04 - Hardy Heron release).

There is, however, a missing dependency in the package which may make the application crash when creating new files. If so, please install the "libmono-i18n2.0-cil" package using Synaptic. This will be fixed in future releases.

Slackware packages are available in the Gnome Slacky repository.

Mandriva packages are available in the official contrib repository.

Gnome Subtitles has received the Editor Award from Uptodown.com.

In other news, quoting a recent article from Linux.com:

Gnome Subtitles is probably the best subtitle editing application in Linux.

Under preparation is release 0.8 of Gnome Subtitles, which is to be expected soon. Stay tuned.

This bugfix release features:

• Updated the about dialog
• Fixed some compilation warnings

Translations:

• Djihed Afifi (ar)
• Yannig Marchegay (oc)

Thanks:

• Tiago Bortoletto Vaz

This bugfix release features:

• Fixed a bug with compilation failing on 64 bit machines
• Fixed a crasher bug that happened when changing to Frames mode after startup
• Fixed a bug in the man page
• Changed the build libdir to work on 64 bit machines
• Updated translation credits in the About dialog

Bug fixes:

• Doesn't work on F7 64b (#487842)
• Crash on video loading (#500264)
• DllNotFoundException when opening a video file (#503049)

Translations:

• Yannig Marchegay (oc)

Thanks:

• Damien Carbery, Karel Hudan, Luciano A. Ferrer, Stanislaw Pitucha, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz